Innovation is curious people saying ‘we can do better’

Some 30 years ago, Russ Thornton left a successful, if not entirely financially fruitful, career as an orchestra conductor in San Francisco and found himself “at the right place at the right time” in California’s Silicon Valley computer science industry. 

Much has changed in the tech space over the past three decades. However, while Stephen Sondheim musicals remain his first love, Mr Thornton’s “sweet spot” career-wise is working with a company “on its transformation journey”.

The journey Mr Thornton has been working on for the past five years has been at UK specialised savings and lending bank Shawbrook, as its chief technology officer. 

“From a career perspective, the past five years at Shawbrook have been the pinnacle of my career,” he adds. Not just with the projects he has been involved in, “but the cultural change that the whole bank has gone through”. 

Recently, Shawbrook transformed its buy-to-let mortgage underwriting process by deploying the Pega Platform from low-code platform provider Pegasystems. 

Shawbrook reduced mortgage processing times to around a quarter of their previous duration and trebled underwriter productivity. 

In its second stage of the deployment, Shawbrook implemented Pega’s case management capabilities to reduce the time it spends processing buy-to-let mortgage applications, from an initial letter of intent to a full mortgage offer. Since the launch in May 2023, Shawbrook has reduced the time it takes from indicative mortgage offer to full mortgage offer in digital buy-to-let deals from 40 days to 11 days on average. Between September and October, this process averaged just four days.

“We deal with a lot of complexities that a lot of the big banks don’t necessarily want to deal with, which is kind of why we’re in business in general,” says Mr Thornton. “Our underwriters need to gather and assimilate large amounts of information in order to then apply their specialist experience and knowledge to make a decision about whether a loan is suitable for a customer or whether the loan is suitable for a bank.”

Before the Pega installation, the bank examined the underwriting process itself with a “fresh set of eyes”, he adds. Shawbrook’s underwriters would spend “a bucketload” of time conducting research, gathering information and running it through policy checks, while a small portion of their time was determining whether a loan was suitable or not for the bank, he explains. “You can automate a bad process and it’s just going to be a bad thing done faster,” he says. 

What Mr Thornton’s team found was that the steps both the broker and the customer needed to go through were draining the entire process. A new way of working was developed, which included automated policy checks and customer dashboard for the underwriters. 

“Our approach is really to minimise the information-gathering and rule checks, so that the underwriter is able to do the specialist stuff,” he says. “We want our smart people to do smart things and we want the technology to do all the mundane things.”

Thirty years ago, technology was often limited to three choices, says Mr Thornton: a Unix, Microsoft or IBM stack. However, today, there are many technological options. 

“It’s brilliant, not just to do things but to understand customer needs and customer sentiment better. That really excites me because I don’t have to worry as much about technology problems,” he says. 

The technology choices available now, such as low- and no-code development, mean Mr Thornton does not have to worry about “hiring rocket science technologists”. Instead, he can focus on recruiting “inquisitive people who want to positively affect consumers and colleagues, versus just thinking about squiggly amps and bits of technology”.

Because of this change, Mr Thornton predicts banking and financial services will see rates of change increase dramatically in the next 12 to 24 months. 

Shawbrook’s five-year transformation journey began slowly when Mr Thornton arrived at the bank. He was given the chance to spend two months meeting and listening to a whole range of people from board members and shareholders to business managers and technology developers. This allowed him to get a “360-degree view” of the bank in order to develop a tech strategy that was capable of reshaping teams and delivering a future digital transformation. 

“Innovation doesn’t have to be — and it shouldn’t be — some big grand reveal,” he says. “It should be a bunch of very curious people saying we can be doing that better.”